Realizing the Avatār

Annam - mythical Legend

Annam typically means food, so initially at this level we see but the most obvious material interpretation of the story, and thus it is factual history, with a particular timeline in specific places and actual characters.

But, since many of these stories are so ancient there is sometimes no water-tight evidence of such a story having actually taken place in the material plane.

Furthermore, because of the need of Itihās to entrance its listeners, these tales have fantastic plot lines, and thus are considered as "mere" Myth - entertaining surely, but the modern meaning of Myth has been deprecated to a cooked-up story, although in the original Greek “mythos” means simply a “story”.

Ah, little do they know what they have lost in the Greek and other pagans gods now relegated to dusty museums, without giving them their due scrutiny.

Prāna - inspiring Tale

The word Prāna indicates the “energy of Life” and has the same root sound as to “inspire” which harks back to the word spirit itself, the essence of who we are as conscious Human Beings.

Beyond mere entertainment, these tales have also been interpreted for their ethical & moral lessons, as inspiring tales of valor in how to live a good life. Prāna indicates breath-taking, which is of course intrinsic to any physical Yoga practice.

Manas - religious History

The nature of the plot that spins out from these Yoga stories is that amazing characters pop up in the fertile imagination of the Mano-maya Kosha.

Thus, these tales have also been deified as religious texts of god-like Beings that walked on this planet in a specific place at a specific time, at a unique moment in history. 

Of course such deification is useful to preserve and transmit across millennia, however these very tales have become the cause of communal strife whereas the whole point is to reduce human conflict - the sheer irony!

Vijnyāna - deep Insights

Now in this layer of the Story dawns a key insight, as warrants the clear intelligence of the Buddhi working in this Kosha, as we understand that these are stories actually describe Yoga as a Mind Science, particularly Hatha Yoga & Rāja Yoga techniques, which are encoded cleverly in Sanskrit words and also in the personalities & actions of the characters. 

The entire perspective here is that these are timeless & universal lessons on human behavior and shared experiences.

Ānanda - blissful Realization

This is when we come to the realization, having absorbed the entire story, that the tale is actually running live in our own Selves. 

Every aspect of our so-called Lifes can be mapped into the storyline, and our Dreams are encoded in this symbology, and this entire life is just a simulation built out of the most amazing simulator.

This is the Bliss of Ānanda as we realize we are indeed the storytellers of our own grand narrative, no longer under the thrall of others’ propaganda.

The essence of Annam, the material nourishment that sustains the conscious Being we are, now nourishes our Mind fully.

Conversational Interface

It's useful to see Koshas as the way that Conscious Beings perceive each other, in order to agree on a common subjective reality.

An API is application programming interface for how two computer systems talk to each other, and the Koshas are the API for the Mind, through the psychic probes we saw earlier.

Essentially now the conscious adaptive system,. of one Mind, its Mindspace, is talking with another's Mindspace through their respective Koshas as the interface points - hence it is like an API.

Better to call this the Psychic Conversation Interface - not programming because our Minds hate to be programmed, which has a direct bearing on how we should be building conscious conversational agents in software.

The key difference from computer API's is that here the Koshas are highly malleable and shift depending on external inputs and internal triggers, that is, our interface points dynamically evolve over time.

Note that as all AI systems will be conversing with humans via NLP, they too will present such malleable interfaces, heretofore not possible in prior computer systems. 

The Yuga

A Yuga is the collective subjective experience of Time. 

Psychological Group Time

Of course physical time exists in a one-way flow, but large groups of society feel as though they are together stuck in a particular experience of Time - maybe it's prosperous, or difficult, or mundane.

From the perspective of Yoga, such a feeling of Time is actually psychological. Just as much as we could step into Sukha and Dukha spaces, by cultivating the sense of the Now, so too societies can shift their Yuga experience.

Thus we we are spiralling in this dimension of psychological Time called युग Yūga cycles.

There are considered to be 4 Yūgas that repeat in cycles:

• कलि युग Kali Yuga , like most of the world today, even if we talk we misunderstand each other - which is the reason we are picky about linguistic precision in this book.

• द्वापर युग Dvāpara Yuga, for example in the famed Krishna’s Time, we can communicate clearly through our vocal apparatus,

• त्रेट युग Threta Yuga , for example in the noble Rāma’s Time, we can communicate even through sheer Thought alone,

• सत्य युग Satya Yuga , at the start of the grand Yūga cycle, we communicate through just our Heart’s Intent alone.

Together these constitute a महा Mahā Yuga.

The Yuga is actually a collective choice we make, so in order to pick which Yuga we wish to experience we need to shift the societal awareness. 

Psychic Group Time

The famed Avatār effect can shift the Yuga in a long-lasting experience which is why a particular type of Avatār is associated with each type of Yuga.

These Yuga periods are said to, thankfully, increase from Kali to Satya in the ratio of 1:2:3:4.

In psychological Time, the Yoga model indicates that we should be spending a lot more time crafting the desired Avatār, rather than tearing our hair out waiting for the next Avatār to somehow magically land on Earth.

There are different mentions of the exact number of years in physical time, which of course we are meant to transcend. 

Most of these physical time periods fall into the multiples of the number :

• 432 =  2^4 * 3^3, in which,

• 2 is the dualities to overcome,

• 4 is the number of Yugas in the cycle, 

• One of the 3's is the three Lokas to transcend in each Yuga

• The second 3 is that we have to do this three times to get to Satya Yuga, because we are usually in Kali Yuga, at the bottom of the pile.

In other mentions of Yuga periods we will see other such factorization into prime numbers, and it's obvious that these are also symbolic, and simply need to be mapped thoughtfully into the different dimensions we have observed of the Yoga mind.

Realizing that Time is but a mental concept means that at some point, while we incrementally work in physical Time towards a “psychological evolution”, reaching for a projected Future with a limited Mind, the end goal is always just out of reach.

When we realize this charade of incrementalism, then one day it all just clicks as a psychic jump, and we transcend these time periods.

Remember, psychic means the emergence of a novel experience in the psyche, hence a psychological evolution.

In other words, incrementally seeking happiness is a tiring endeavor, and at some point we realize that we might as well go for the perpetual bliss of Ananda itself.

Sandhyā

Sandhyā literally means San (perfected) + Dhyā (to do meditation), and it is typically used for the start/end time periods of any Yuga.

Typically considered to be 1/10th of the whole Yuga, they are considered really important times in which to get into the really deepest meditation to invoke the next Avatār we desire.

So for example, if we are living a life embodying a particular Avatār, for say 10 hours in the day, then one of those hours should be to invoke the next Avatār, and this period would be the Sandhyā period.

Typically the Sandhyā times are aligned with daily transition times of dawn, midday, dusk.